How does shotcut treats .mlt dropped on a timeline?

[MOCKBA]

@DvS

Such a way of working is absolutely unusual for me and makes no sense at all!

This is how it is done in the industry (plus/minus intermediate renders). Often than not it is different people who cut a scenes and who do post production of a whole movie. They share timelines (or intermediate renders).

@Austin

MLT-in-MLT is slower to render because a frame goes through two separate compositing pipelines instead of just one. If it didn’t go through the second compositor, there wouldn’t be the option to color grade the MLT clip or to overlay text above it in a separate track.

That’s what I suspected.

It would be nice to be able to bring in a timeline (MLT) into another timeline without multiple compositors. Say in Adobe one could drop a timeline into timeline into timeline… etc and it doesn’t matter - Adobe would go down to the source material building effect stack prior to rendering… Hey one could even direct-link into different application…

I think the easiest way to implement this in Shotcut is thru “special drag and drop” of MLT into a separate track that would “expand an MLT” into source producers… but then an MLT could have multiple tracks too and video project would become a bloody mess vs. say Premiere or FCP… so it is just a hack and better idea is needed.

I guess I could write a script to “normalize” my post production MLT by “expanding” scenes MLTs into tractor prior to rendering… Hmm, this is how this problem of multiple compositors could be solved! by normalizing MLTs in MLT just before kicking out melt with export MLT.

Let me ask this - is it a tractor (in MLT) that starts a compositing pipeline?